Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant. There's two./ hot buttons here: spam and abusing the courts. It's a tale of a bunch of shitty people being shitty each other, and we're the one's footing the bill for the judge who has to oversee it all, and the courtroom and clerks they're using.
Not many./ers are capable of understanding that sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system). It's 'haha' because someone who thought he was gaming the system got busted.
As the poster below noted, there is a full box set at $169 US that includes Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWorks in it. As I just confirmed on the phone with AppleCare, the $29 version does check for Leopard and will refuse to install without it.
10.0 to 10.6 are seven sequential OSes, each one extending the functionality of the previous version. Just like 2000->XP->Vista->7. You're just confused because Apple is capable of releasing an operating system each time Windows release a service pack.
I was going to mention this system. It works really, really well, after you've registered, and registering by phone actually isn't that hard. You even get sent an SMS just before your time runs out, so you can add time from wherever you are.
I think the issue with knowing the course accurately has to do with being able to communicate with it. Knowing its course means knowing how it should be oriented to keep an antenna pointed at the Earth.
The BSA doesn't get nearly the press that the RIAA does, intentionally or otherwise, for descending on a small business with sheriffs in tow and carrying a no-knock warrant. It's hard to hate them when you don't know they even exist.
As I understand it, not a lot of the CC numbers actually get used for identity theft. Most of the money in stealing the cards is selling the list to others. Besides, if you had 130 million CC numbers dropped in your lap, what would you do with them? At most you could personally exploit only a tiny fraction of them usefully.
The big financial hit here is the credit card companies having to do a mass cancel/resend of cards, as happened to me after the TJ Maxx heist.
As any MMO dev will tell you, open betas do get you a ton of useless feedback. The trick to running a good open beta is learning to filter for the useful feedback. There was an infamous incident in the beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea, where some devs actually posted to the Beta forums that they'd stopped reading the forums because most of what they were getting there was useless to them.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the inherent nature of the PC platform precludes releasing a perfectly stable 1.0 release that will run on anything and everything that could be called a PC, completely done, completely bug-free?
You can't release a perfectly stable 1.0, completely bug-free release on a console either. Perfectly bug free software is a mythical ideal. What you can do on both platforms is QA until you've eliminated the vast majority of bugs. On consoles that's more important because you can't patch, but there's no reason you can't do it on a PC either. It's not impossible to release good quality software on a PC, as I've experienced.
So as far as the PC platform is concerned, "a good QA team" only serves to run damage control reports to the devs on what they found wrong, even though chances are, you're only scraping the surface of what's really wrong with the product and you can't possibly find out everything that's wrong until your customers get a hold of it.
I'm not sure where you get this hate-on for QA. First, as a practical matter, if you eliminate QA departments, you've just shifted the QA function to the devs themselves, who have to do more testing of their code to make sure it works enough to be released.
But to be clear, you're wrong. QA does much more than run damage control reports. They test common and uncommon scenarios. They run through scripts that approximate user actions. They file detailed bug reports with full reproducibility steps, saving devs time from figuring out how a particular error occurred. You're not scraping the surface of what's wrong with the product--you're guaranteeing by directed trial-and-error that most use cases work as expected. If the software doesn't work properly, that's a sign of bad or missing QA, not QA's irrelevance.
I can't speak for other software vendors, but at my last employer, the software we released functioned properly for the vast majority of cases. There were bugs that needed to be fixed, but overall, customers were very satisfied with the quality, and that was, in part, to QA's credit. I knew some of the guys in QA. I saw what they did and how much useful feedback they gave to the devs.
Incidentally, "adding features" and "fixing bugs" can be considered the same thing, since a feature that is commonly requested is for the product to actually work.
This is just... I don't know what you mean, but I think you have very little experience with releasing commercial software. Most software released on PC does work for most uses for most people. But to be clear, when I said "adding features" above, I meant customers requesting features that the software didn't have.
You keep phrasing this in terms of right and wrong: "bill of rights", "justified", etc. This is entirely a market issue. My observations about premium content are a market rationalization that may or may not work over time, but if it changes, it'll be because of changing market conditions and the purchasing patterns of gamers. Sure they could do a better job, offering more for less. But the only thing that will make them do that is a spreadsheet.
Where did I say that you shouldn't have an open beta? I said an open beta is no substitute for a good QA department.
All the products I worked with worked on release, and had bugs that got reported to us by customers. What demonstrated to me that the QA department was worth it was that after each release, most of the feedback from customers through Support was requests to add features, not bugs.
Having worked with a good QA team, I have to disagree. An open beta gets you tons of feedback that's useless because it's mainly "I totally hit that guy but it didn't register" or "your class balance sucks" or "you should add a weapon to covers dudes in goo!" Very little beta feedback besides crash dumps matches up to the spec in any meaningful way.
There is no "should" or "shouldn't". There's what gamers will pay for and what they won't. And gamers haven't shown a lot collective intelligence in demanding anything.
I doubt that would be economical, even if it were feasible, which I don't think it is. Besides the fact that the retro-reflectors would need an absurd degree of control to reflect back precisely down the incoming path without losing coherence, you have the fact that lasers in air are constantly losing energy due to atmospheric interaction. The laser that leaves the plane at, say, 100MW, is at 50MW when it strikes the missile 10 miles away.
Think of a bullet: its highest velocity is its muzzle velocity as it leaves the barrel. After that it's continually being slowed down by air resistance (and for high velocity rounds, the shockwave built up). If you could reflect a bullet perfectly down its path with no loss of energy, it would be going too slow to do much damage when it hit the barrel from which it came. And with both a laser and a bullet, you're guaranteed to lose some energy on the 'retro-reflection'.
How many missiles it can handle depends on how long it takes to destroy one missile. One second per missile (or less) means it can handle several missiles a minute, at least. And all you need to do is have multiple planes in the air at all times, as the U.S. maintained for 50 years after WWII with its strategic bomber force.
The Tactical High Energy Laser was a ground based system that was able to destroy multiple artillery/mortar shells in flight almost simultaneously. We're not talking about focussing a laser on something and taking minutes to burn through. We're talking about a high energy laser instantaneously dumping a ton of heat energy into an object. It's like getting hit with a bullet, only the energy is thermal rather than kinetic.
This has nothing to do with rights. When you buy a console, you're buying a particular type of premium platform: streamlined game delivery, dedicated controller, etc. It's no different than people who buy Apple products paying for common bits of software (or more for hardware) that PC users get for free because of the much larger market with far poorer quality control.
Quality control is one of the biggest advantages of console gaming, and it's long been a complaint of PC gamers that their versions of games are buggy because the studios don't put the QA time into them because they can always release patches, while console games have to be relatively bug free on first release.
Doesn't matter, apparently. The total amount of energy in the laser overheats the reflective surface long before a significant amount of the light is reflected. One of the problems of aiming high powered lasers is that the mirrors that guide the beam melt.
I took one look at the front page, realized that you created 24 pages to show 20 slides, understood that your main point here was maximizing ad revenue, and closed the tab.
I'm sure that getting something for nothing is a large part of a lot of admin's reasons for choosing CentOS over RH, and why a lot of the complaining here about a bit of turmoil in the project seems hysterical. They're the ones who chose a distribution run by volunteers, and implicit in that is that you might have to deal with stuff like this. They gambled on having no drama, and they lost. But all that means is that they might have to do some work to cover for the ups and downs of the project. If you spreadsheeted it all out, it's probably still worth it for a lot of them.
And really, if you ran several mission critical systems with CentOS, what would you have to do right now? Nothing. The core team is still in place, having seized control from a laggard volunteer. The schedule is still in place (and has been all through Lance's absence). The worst case is that CentOS freezes where it is, and one follows updates of RH to determine if one needs to do something while planning for an orderly migration--or simply signing up for the support agreement they were trying to avoid in the first place.
I've worked with customers who have large, mission critical systems, and the idea that they need a vendor who can constantly stream updates and fixes is a bit of a joke for most of them, because their IT best practices dictate an update process that makes even quarterly updates difficult at best. Most of them simply wait for a huge emergency update and make it cumulative, because it's too much trouble to do otherwise.
I agree that whether or not they recover depends a lot on what happened to the PayPal money. If Lance didn't steal it, it should all be there or accountably spent, and presumably the next committee in charge will make that public. If he did steal the money, and they publicize that as well (along with criminal charges), that'll also go a ways towards earning back some trust.
But I just can't figure why people here are freaking out about this so much. Embezzling donations is far less common in significant OSS projects than simple people drama causing a flurry of e-drama. And at the end of the day, as others here have observed, anyone using CentOS in the first place isn't (or shouldn't be) counting on a rock solid project that'll never self-destruct or go away. If that level of certainty is that important to you, you buy Red Hat or SuSE. You don't count on a free project where things like this can (and frequently do) happen.
I doubt you'll hear about what happened to Lance, in part because I doubt it was anything more than Lance wanting not to deal with his CentOS obligations after doing it for many years. It sounds like he was just ignoring them, and the speed with which he appeared and surrendered the key properties implies that he was never seriously prevented from participating.
Also, resolving the issue means getting the key properties back, and repairing the damage caused by the open letter, which was IMHO necessary to resolve it. If they slag off Lance after this, they're re-opening a wound freshly closed. If this is all there is to it, and they keep up their release schedule, then six months from now this will all be forgotten.
Of course, all bets are off if there's malfeasance with the PayPal money. I imagine, though, that they need Lance's co-operation to get that handed over, and they're trying to do it nicely.
All mature OSS software does. It always starts with a key person (or a few key people). The ones that survive and become mature are the ones that gain their independence from those key people through a co-operative coup where the leaders abdicate and hand over control to a committee/foundation.
For all the handwringing here, it's worth remembering that this was a pretty small issue. Davis controls the domain, the IRC channels, and the PayPal account. Nothing about continuing to release the distribution was ever threatened by his absence. It's ultimately small potatoes. The house hasn't burnt down, and there wasn't smoke in the first place. They got 5.3 out the door with no help from Lance at all. This is about administrative issues.
Confidence? Confidence?
Sure. They had a problem with one of the team members. Over time they tried to resolve the problem in various ways, ultimately escalating it to a public confrontation that successfully resolved the issue. That means 1) there are guys on the project who care about it enough to bother, 2) they weren't afraid of taking some hard steps to solve the problem. Ultimately, CentOS will be improved by moving to foundation management rather than key person model.
Imagine instead if Lance's absence made the key maintainers drift away to other projects where they didn't have to deal with him. CentOS dies a slow death for lack of updates, like so many other OSS projects.
Every mature OSS project moves beyond the key figures that launched it, and becomes its own organizational entity. We just saw CentOS take that important step forward. Good on them.
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Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant. There's two ./ hot buttons here: spam and abusing the courts. It's a tale of a bunch of shitty people being shitty each other, and we're the one's footing the bill for the judge who has to oversee it all, and the courtroom and clerks they're using.
Not many ./ers are capable of understanding that sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system). It's 'haha' because someone who thought he was gaming the system got busted.
As the poster below noted, there is a full box set at $169 US that includes Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWorks in it. As I just confirmed on the phone with AppleCare, the $29 version does check for Leopard and will refuse to install without it.
10.0 to 10.6 are seven sequential OSes, each one extending the functionality of the previous version. Just like 2000->XP->Vista->7. You're just confused because Apple is capable of releasing an operating system each time Windows release a service pack.
The OS X equivalents of service packs are free. Upgrades cost money--I believe Snow Leopard is $29 for Leopard users. The retail price is $129.
I was going to mention this system. It works really, really well, after you've registered, and registering by phone actually isn't that hard. You even get sent an SMS just before your time runs out, so you can add time from wherever you are.
I don't think the typical Stormtrooper reaction to a riot is the start handing out beatdowns.
I think the issue with knowing the course accurately has to do with being able to communicate with it. Knowing its course means knowing how it should be oriented to keep an antenna pointed at the Earth.
The BSA doesn't get nearly the press that the RIAA does, intentionally or otherwise, for descending on a small business with sheriffs in tow and carrying a no-knock warrant. It's hard to hate them when you don't know they even exist.
As I understand it, not a lot of the CC numbers actually get used for identity theft. Most of the money in stealing the cards is selling the list to others. Besides, if you had 130 million CC numbers dropped in your lap, what would you do with them? At most you could personally exploit only a tiny fraction of them usefully.
The big financial hit here is the credit card companies having to do a mass cancel/resend of cards, as happened to me after the TJ Maxx heist.
As any MMO dev will tell you, open betas do get you a ton of useless feedback. The trick to running a good open beta is learning to filter for the useful feedback. There was an infamous incident in the beta for Pirates of the Burning Sea, where some devs actually posted to the Beta forums that they'd stopped reading the forums because most of what they were getting there was useless to them.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the inherent nature of the PC platform precludes releasing a perfectly stable 1.0 release that will run on anything and everything that could be called a PC, completely done, completely bug-free?
You can't release a perfectly stable 1.0, completely bug-free release on a console either. Perfectly bug free software is a mythical ideal. What you can do on both platforms is QA until you've eliminated the vast majority of bugs. On consoles that's more important because you can't patch, but there's no reason you can't do it on a PC either. It's not impossible to release good quality software on a PC, as I've experienced.
So as far as the PC platform is concerned, "a good QA team" only serves to run damage control reports to the devs on what they found wrong, even though chances are, you're only scraping the surface of what's really wrong with the product and you can't possibly find out everything that's wrong until your customers get a hold of it.
I'm not sure where you get this hate-on for QA. First, as a practical matter, if you eliminate QA departments, you've just shifted the QA function to the devs themselves, who have to do more testing of their code to make sure it works enough to be released.
But to be clear, you're wrong. QA does much more than run damage control reports. They test common and uncommon scenarios. They run through scripts that approximate user actions. They file detailed bug reports with full reproducibility steps, saving devs time from figuring out how a particular error occurred. You're not scraping the surface of what's wrong with the product--you're guaranteeing by directed trial-and-error that most use cases work as expected. If the software doesn't work properly, that's a sign of bad or missing QA, not QA's irrelevance.
I can't speak for other software vendors, but at my last employer, the software we released functioned properly for the vast majority of cases. There were bugs that needed to be fixed, but overall, customers were very satisfied with the quality, and that was, in part, to QA's credit. I knew some of the guys in QA. I saw what they did and how much useful feedback they gave to the devs.
Incidentally, "adding features" and "fixing bugs" can be considered the same thing, since a feature that is commonly requested is for the product to actually work.
This is just... I don't know what you mean, but I think you have very little experience with releasing commercial software. Most software released on PC does work for most uses for most people. But to be clear, when I said "adding features" above, I meant customers requesting features that the software didn't have.
You keep phrasing this in terms of right and wrong: "bill of rights", "justified", etc. This is entirely a market issue. My observations about premium content are a market rationalization that may or may not work over time, but if it changes, it'll be because of changing market conditions and the purchasing patterns of gamers. Sure they could do a better job, offering more for less. But the only thing that will make them do that is a spreadsheet.
Where did I say that you shouldn't have an open beta? I said an open beta is no substitute for a good QA department.
All the products I worked with worked on release, and had bugs that got reported to us by customers. What demonstrated to me that the QA department was worth it was that after each release, most of the feedback from customers through Support was requests to add features, not bugs.
Having worked with a good QA team, I have to disagree. An open beta gets you tons of feedback that's useless because it's mainly "I totally hit that guy but it didn't register" or "your class balance sucks" or "you should add a weapon to covers dudes in goo!" Very little beta feedback besides crash dumps matches up to the spec in any meaningful way.
There is no "should" or "shouldn't". There's what gamers will pay for and what they won't. And gamers haven't shown a lot collective intelligence in demanding anything.
I doubt that would be economical, even if it were feasible, which I don't think it is. Besides the fact that the retro-reflectors would need an absurd degree of control to reflect back precisely down the incoming path without losing coherence, you have the fact that lasers in air are constantly losing energy due to atmospheric interaction. The laser that leaves the plane at, say, 100MW, is at 50MW when it strikes the missile 10 miles away.
Think of a bullet: its highest velocity is its muzzle velocity as it leaves the barrel. After that it's continually being slowed down by air resistance (and for high velocity rounds, the shockwave built up). If you could reflect a bullet perfectly down its path with no loss of energy, it would be going too slow to do much damage when it hit the barrel from which it came. And with both a laser and a bullet, you're guaranteed to lose some energy on the 'retro-reflection'.
How many missiles it can handle depends on how long it takes to destroy one missile. One second per missile (or less) means it can handle several missiles a minute, at least. And all you need to do is have multiple planes in the air at all times, as the U.S. maintained for 50 years after WWII with its strategic bomber force.
The Tactical High Energy Laser was a ground based system that was able to destroy multiple artillery/mortar shells in flight almost simultaneously. We're not talking about focussing a laser on something and taking minutes to burn through. We're talking about a high energy laser instantaneously dumping a ton of heat energy into an object. It's like getting hit with a bullet, only the energy is thermal rather than kinetic.
This has nothing to do with rights. When you buy a console, you're buying a particular type of premium platform: streamlined game delivery, dedicated controller, etc. It's no different than people who buy Apple products paying for common bits of software (or more for hardware) that PC users get for free because of the much larger market with far poorer quality control.
Quality control is one of the biggest advantages of console gaming, and it's long been a complaint of PC gamers that their versions of games are buggy because the studios don't put the QA time into them because they can always release patches, while console games have to be relatively bug free on first release.
Doesn't matter, apparently. The total amount of energy in the laser overheats the reflective surface long before a significant amount of the light is reflected. One of the problems of aiming high powered lasers is that the mirrors that guide the beam melt.
How do you Digby employees find the time to put crapware into your product when you're busy here?
Good lord, does Digby have an entire astroturfing department? Genius!
I took one look at the front page, realized that you created 24 pages to show 20 slides, understood that your main point here was maximizing ad revenue, and closed the tab.
I'm sure that getting something for nothing is a large part of a lot of admin's reasons for choosing CentOS over RH, and why a lot of the complaining here about a bit of turmoil in the project seems hysterical. They're the ones who chose a distribution run by volunteers, and implicit in that is that you might have to deal with stuff like this. They gambled on having no drama, and they lost. But all that means is that they might have to do some work to cover for the ups and downs of the project. If you spreadsheeted it all out, it's probably still worth it for a lot of them.
And really, if you ran several mission critical systems with CentOS, what would you have to do right now? Nothing. The core team is still in place, having seized control from a laggard volunteer. The schedule is still in place (and has been all through Lance's absence). The worst case is that CentOS freezes where it is, and one follows updates of RH to determine if one needs to do something while planning for an orderly migration--or simply signing up for the support agreement they were trying to avoid in the first place.
I've worked with customers who have large, mission critical systems, and the idea that they need a vendor who can constantly stream updates and fixes is a bit of a joke for most of them, because their IT best practices dictate an update process that makes even quarterly updates difficult at best. Most of them simply wait for a huge emergency update and make it cumulative, because it's too much trouble to do otherwise.
I agree that whether or not they recover depends a lot on what happened to the PayPal money. If Lance didn't steal it, it should all be there or accountably spent, and presumably the next committee in charge will make that public. If he did steal the money, and they publicize that as well (along with criminal charges), that'll also go a ways towards earning back some trust.
But I just can't figure why people here are freaking out about this so much. Embezzling donations is far less common in significant OSS projects than simple people drama causing a flurry of e-drama. And at the end of the day, as others here have observed, anyone using CentOS in the first place isn't (or shouldn't be) counting on a rock solid project that'll never self-destruct or go away. If that level of certainty is that important to you, you buy Red Hat or SuSE. You don't count on a free project where things like this can (and frequently do) happen.
I doubt you'll hear about what happened to Lance, in part because I doubt it was anything more than Lance wanting not to deal with his CentOS obligations after doing it for many years. It sounds like he was just ignoring them, and the speed with which he appeared and surrendered the key properties implies that he was never seriously prevented from participating.
Also, resolving the issue means getting the key properties back, and repairing the damage caused by the open letter, which was IMHO necessary to resolve it. If they slag off Lance after this, they're re-opening a wound freshly closed. If this is all there is to it, and they keep up their release schedule, then six months from now this will all be forgotten.
Of course, all bets are off if there's malfeasance with the PayPal money. I imagine, though, that they need Lance's co-operation to get that handed over, and they're trying to do it nicely.
All mature OSS software does. It always starts with a key person (or a few key people). The ones that survive and become mature are the ones that gain their independence from those key people through a co-operative coup where the leaders abdicate and hand over control to a committee/foundation.
For all the handwringing here, it's worth remembering that this was a pretty small issue. Davis controls the domain, the IRC channels, and the PayPal account. Nothing about continuing to release the distribution was ever threatened by his absence. It's ultimately small potatoes. The house hasn't burnt down, and there wasn't smoke in the first place. They got 5.3 out the door with no help from Lance at all. This is about administrative issues.
Sure. They had a problem with one of the team members. Over time they tried to resolve the problem in various ways, ultimately escalating it to a public confrontation that successfully resolved the issue. That means 1) there are guys on the project who care about it enough to bother, 2) they weren't afraid of taking some hard steps to solve the problem. Ultimately, CentOS will be improved by moving to foundation management rather than key person model.
Imagine instead if Lance's absence made the key maintainers drift away to other projects where they didn't have to deal with him. CentOS dies a slow death for lack of updates, like so many other OSS projects.
Every mature OSS project moves beyond the key figures that launched it, and becomes its own organizational entity. We just saw CentOS take that important step forward. Good on them.